“What you see is not what you get--tread carefully and do your research ”

Comp & Benefits

Work/Life Balance

Senior Management

Culture & Values

Career Opportunities

Former Employee - Anonymous Employee in Washington, DC

Former Employee - Anonymous Employee in Washington, DC

I worked at CoStar Group full-time (less than a year)

Pros

Colleagues are wonderful and very hard-working professionals; state-of-the-art building; good benefits; nice location in downtown DC; from entry level roles there is a lot of career advancement opportunities; your chances of success at CoStar are greater if you do not work in the HQ location

Cons

It's like working for "big brother" - you are watched constantly; senior leadership does not trust it's employees; there is no work-life balance, you will be worked to the bone; the culture is one of fear and constantly moving targets

Costar was a great place for me. It was challenging and enjoyable. I adored the clients and the majority of coworkers. The product is great and sells itself. It is mostly relationship building & maintaining. Not rocket science! If you keep numbers up, senior management remains happy.

Cons

Some micro-management from corporate. The GOOD managers filter most of this out.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Let the hard-working, strong reps continue doing well for the company. Encourage them and be sure to LISTEN to them - they are the ones on the front lines.

Good location. Nice office space at HQ, especially for a glorified call center. Some employees are very bright and committed and try to do the best job they can despite the insanity of a "metric driven" company.

Cons

Only one example is necessary to underscore the dysfunctionality of the organization. The CEO decided to create his own building rating system that would change the Class A, B, and C normally used to 1-5 stars.

Not a big deal you say. To accomplish the task, he put all 700 of his researchers on the assignment for three solid weeks. Not a big deal you say. Each of those 700 researchers had to validate the ratings of 4,600 properties (4 million in total). I'll save you the math. That works out to be an average of 90 seconds per property, every minute of every day for the 3 weeks. Let me be clear, not a few hours a day, not even half days, but every 90 seconds for 8 hours a day for 3 weeks. Take a break to get coffee, and that put you behind. The metrics (this is what it means to be a metric driven company) were being watched live to make sure there were no slackers.

So how did it turn out? Almost no training of the employees made any consistency questionable. Perhaps this was all worth it, but what company owner would divert his whole staff to a task of this magnitude with no real training, and here's the rub, expect them to keep up with their normal workload.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Sometimes the person that builds an organization is the wrong person to run it. This is a case of that. The CEO built a great business model, but the time is well past for him to move on, remove his warped influences and leave it in the hands of others to grow.